The lifestyle

When we were looking for homes, and even long before, I often heard people refer to homeownership as "a lifestyle"... and I never quite understood what that meant. I remember in high school, and quite frankly my entire youth, getting together with neighbors or family and hearing the conversation drift to, "ahhh yeah we spent Saturday working on the house" and thinking "man, how boring. why would you ever want to own a house? It sounds like too much work." and then, like the invasion of the body snatchers, the pod people came and I morphed seemingly overnight into one of those "working on the home people."

The thing is, people say it with such disdain... "ughhh I had to work on the house," and maybe I'm delusional and we're in the honeymoon stage of home ownership, but I freaking LOVE it. It definitely takes the right frame of mind, and right place in your life, but M agrees: nothing brings me such satisfaction as watching a room transform. Not huge changes, but paint colors, side tables, crown molding, and having people come over and tell you how cute your living room is thinking "I did ALL this myself. I made almost EVERYTHING in my room."

Anywhoo, M and I spent this past Sunday hunkered down and putting some finishing touches on our living room. We had been using a semi-circle side table for our TV stand for the longest time, debating whether to get a faux fireplace, just a faux fireplace mantle to put it on, or floating shelves. Well, we finally had enough and decided to go with the cheapest option- floating shelves. As I mentioned in my tree post I had been wanting to get a small entryway table for a while now. I had my eye on one at Target that was $99, when it hit me: why not convert the semi-circle table into an entryway table! It'd sit perfectly along the wall,...all we needed was to raise the legs.


My initial bright idea was to just saw them off where they met the top and baseboard. M, uncharacteristically, decided we should try to unscrew it first to see how it came apart and salvage some pieces. We bought some table legs at Home Depot for $8.24 or so a pop.

and we (M) dismantled the table

We used the old top, and screwed the table legs in through the top of the base. M used some wood fill to cover up the screw top, and sanded it down. I just realized I have NO pictures of the finished product, (woops) and will have to get those. But we sanded it and painted it black, to match the rest of the furniture.

We then installed these floating shelves for the TV. I have no picture of the final product of this either. We got a black cord keeper so there's no longer a mess of cords dangling down, and I went to Michaels and got a tall vase and tall fake flowers that are currently sitting below the TV. We've been having a silent standoff with TJ and the flowers. For the most part he seems to ignore them, but every now and then he'll creep over and test his luck.

Speaking of TJ, this is how he spent our "housework sunday".... just inspecting the small fuzzy lining of the window base. Everything checked out okay.

-Kelly